Research
Active Projects
Lead distance under a pickoff limit in Major League Baseball: A sequential game model ⚾
w/ Sivaramakrishnan Ramani, Jacob Hahn and Andrew Schaefer
2024 Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Vancouver)
2024 Saberseminar (Chicago)
Ball path curvature and in-game free throw shooting proficiency in the National Basketball Association 🏀
w/ Ruoqian (Judy) Zhu and Dave Love
2025 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Boston)
A comps-based approach for interpreting tree-based predictions with an application to the NFL draft 🏈
w/ Elisabeth Millington
2025 Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference (Pittsburgh)
2025 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Boston)
Pitch trajectory density estimation for predicting future outcomes ⚾
w/ Vicente Iglesias
2024 Conference of Texas Statisticians (Houston)
2023 Saberseminar (Chicago)
Published Projects
Swinging, Fast and Slow: Interpreting variation in baseball swing tracking metrics ⚾
Powers S, Yurko R (2026)
The American Statistician
2024 Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Vancouver)
2024 Saberseminar (Chicago)
Estimating individual contributions to team success in women’s college volleyball 🏐
Powers S, Stancil L, Consiglio N (2025)
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports 21(2) 117-135
2024 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (Boston)
2023 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Boston)
Nuclear penalized multinomial regression with an application to predicting at bat outcomes in baseball ⚾
Powers S, Hastie T, Tibshirani R (2018)
Statistical Modelling 18(5-6) 388-410
2016 Joint Statistical Meetings (Chicago)
A linear model for estimating optimal service error fraction in volleyball 🏐
Burton T, Powers S (2015)
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports 11(2) 117-129
Mutually-antagonistic interactions in baseball networks ⚾
Saavedra S, Powers S, McCotter T, Porter MA, Mucha PJ (2010)
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 389 1131-1141
Conference Presentations
Invited Talks
Winning baseball games by solving statistics puzzles ⚾
2025 International Conference on Statistics and Data Science (Vancouver)
Invited Panels
Building the Academic Playbook for Sports Analytics Education
w/ Amanda Glazer, John Tobias and Ron Yurko
2026 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (Boston)
The Past, Present, and Future of Sports Analytics in Industry and the Academy
w/ Zach Knowlton, Stephanie Kovalchik, Mike Lopez, Brian Macdonald and Ron Yurko
2025 Joint Statistical Meetings (Nashville)
Data Science and Analytics in Sports Performance and Management
w/ Mark Broadie, Natalie Kupperman and Jill McNitt-Gray
2024 Columbia Symposium on AI and Sports (New York)
Student Talks
Modifying k-means clustering to optimize defensive positioning in volleyball 🏐
Naomi Consiglio @ Women in Sports Data Symposium 2024 (Philadelphia)
Do we learn more about AAA batters when they face better pitches? ⚾
Jeff Brover @ Saberseminar 2024 (Chicago)
Time warping for clustering pitcher deliveries ⚾
Drew Haugen @ Saberseminar 2024 (Chicago)
Student Posters
A statistical approach to sport climbing difficulty and progression 🧗
Elizabeth Sepúlveda @ Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports 2024 (Vancouver)
Not All Features Are Created Equal: Player clustering and evaluation ⚽
Andrew Kang @ Opta Forum 2024 (London)
Wayback Machine
Jointly predicting exit velocity and launch angle for batter-pitcher matchups ⚾
2016 Saberseminar (Boston)
True wOBA: Estimation of true talent level for batters ⚾
2016 SABR Analytics Conference (Phoenix)
Rewarding batters for baserunner advancement: A ridge-regressed Rasch model ⚾
2015 Saberseminar (Boston)